Midrealm

by Garrett Robinson

  “Yes, he is,” I said, confused. “We’ve got a study session tonight.”

  Principal Jones furrowed his brow and steepled his fingers. “Miles was caught cheating on a biology test today. His teacher found a cheat sheet of answers beneath Miles’ chair.”

  “What?” I said, too loudly. “That doesn’t make any sense!” Then I realized I was talking to the principal and tried to compose myself.

  “Go on,” he said, sounding amused.

  “Miles is an ace at biology, Principal Jones,” I said. “He’s never had any problems with it, definitely not enough to cheat. History, maybe, or geography. But, more than that, he’s not a cheater. He works hard. He’s never tried anything shifty when we’ve been studying.”

  “How certain are you? Do you know him well outside of class?”

  I blushed, not sure how to explain without embarrassing myself. “I don’t hang out with many people outside of school, Principal Jones, and Miles isn’t one of them. But I’m telling you, he isn’t a cheat. I know him well enough to know that.”

  “Hm,” said Principal Jones, pursing his lips. “Hm, hm, hm. Well, we’re still investigating the matter. But I’ll admit, I’m relieved to hear you say that. Miles is hardly ever in trouble. It would be a nasty shock to find out he was cheating.”

  “He wasn’t,” I said. “I promise you, he wasn’t.”

  “Well, he’s been assigned detention today,” said Principal Jones. “I’d remove it, but his teacher seems fairly convinced of Miles’ guilt and I don’t want to step on any toes. You may tutor him in detention if you wish.”

  “Thank you,” I said gratefully. Miles couldn’t afford to miss a session. We were getting into Middle Eastern geography, and it was rough for him. “Listen, couldn’t Miles re-take the test? With new questions? I swear, he knows biology like nobody’s business.”

  “I don’t think it should be a problem,” said Principal Jones. “Especially with how strongly you’re vouching for him.” He stood from his desk, signaling an end to our meeting.

  “Thank you, Principal Jones,” I said, getting up to go.

  “Oh, and Sarah,” Principal Jones said just as I started to step through the door. I turned to look at him. “We have to finish counting the votes before it’s official, but…congratulations.” His smile was as wide as I’d ever seen it.

  I managed to keep an idiot grin off my face, restraining myself to a small smile and a nod of thanks.

  And then I did my happy dance as soon as I was alone in the hallway.

  I was walking on clouds the rest of the day, but I didn’t explain my grin to anyone; I didn’t want to jinx it. Finally the last bell rang, and Principal Jones’ voice boomed over the loudspeaker for the second time that day. “It is my great pleasure to congratulate your new student body president, with a landslide victory, Miss Sarah Preston!”

  The class I was in erupted in cheers. Students swarmed to my desk to congratulate me. Out in the hall, it was the same thing. Even the guy I was running against, a guy named Steve, shook my hand.

  “I don’t even know why I ran,” he said, smiling. “Congratulations.”

  I think of that moment every now and then. Up to that point, it was probably the happiest moment in my life. And it was the last simple moment for a long, long time.

  As soon as I could free myself from the crowd, I went to the detention room. I almost bumped headfirst into Raven outside the door.

  “Oh, sorry,” I said. “I wasn’t looking where I was going.”

  “Me neither,” she said, smirking. “But you have an excuse. Congratulations.”

  “Thanks,” I said, grinning. “I didn’t know you cared about school elections.”

  “I don’t,” she snickered. “I didn’t vote.”

  I giggled, then frowned. “Are you in detention?”

  “I didn’t get out of that tree fast enough,” she said ruefully. “Mister Schumacher caught me smoking. Thanks for the warning, anyway.”

  “No problem.” I hesitated a moment before continuing. “Hey, listen…maybe we should hang out some time. Go to the mall or something. You could take me to Hot Topic, I could take you to Old Navy.”

  She rolled her eyes with another smirk. “Maybe sometime.”

  She entered the detention room. I didn’t feel like she was enthusiastic about the idea. It probably wouldn’t happen. I sighed and entered behind her.

  Miles was sitting in the front row. As soon as he saw me he shook his head in exasperation.

  “Can you believe this?” he asked. “They won’t listen to me, Sarah. They think I cheated.”

  “I know you didn’t, Miles,” I told him reassuringly. “Not on biology, anyway.”

  He grinned. Miles has always had an amazing smile. He’s really tall and black and has the body of a long distance runner. He’s not as big as the guys on the football team, not as muscular as the guys who play basketball, but he’s really fit. And he’s got this great personality that makes it impossible not to like him. He was one of my favorite students I tutored.

  “I talked to Principal Jones,” I told him. “I think you’re going to be fine. They’re going to set you up with a new test, random answers. If you pass, they’ll probably leave it off your record.”

  “I hope so,” Miles said. “I can’t have something like that if I’m going to get into USC.”

  “They’ll probably let you in on your running alone.” I was a little envious. Miles had athletics, which could open the door to a lot of universities. I only had my mind. “Anyway, right now you need to learn the difference between Baghdad and Bahrain. Come on, let’s crack some books.”

  “You’re staying in detention?” he asked, shocked.

  “Of course,” I told him. “How else are you going to catch up?”

  “Man, Sarah,” he said, shaking his head. “I don’t know how to thank you. Remind me to name some new species after you one day.”

  “I will,” I told him. “Now get your books.”

  Miles dug through his backpack while I scanned the room. Raven was sitting in the back corner of the room, texting on her phone. Blade was in the other back corner of the room; no surprise.

  But there was a surprise sitting in the front row. It was the shy girl who’d wished me luck earlier. She stared at her desk, but there was no book there. I wondered why she was in detention. She seemed so timid, so far from a troublemaker.

  The door opened behind me, and I heard a familiar voice.

  “Sweet sabers of Slugaduch, Sarah, what are you doing in detention?”

  I tried not to groan. It’s possible I didn’t totally succeed. There in the doorway, grinning below his mane of curly red hair, was my cousin Calvin. He was wearing a shirt with a picture of Darth Vader on it that said, WHO’S YOUR DADDY?

  “Hi Calvin,” I said.

  Calvin wasn’t even fourteen yet, but he was a sophomore. He was crazy smart, emphasis on “crazy,” in a mad scientist kind of way. He did experiments. Lots of them. Sometimes those experiments went wrong in alarmingly explosive ways.

  Calvin was also a super geek. If he were a superhero, that would be his name: Super Geek. If it wasn’t Star Trek or Lord of the Rings or whatever, Calvin wasn’t interested. Sometimes I thought Calvin’s science experiments were just an attempt to give himself super powers.

  “I don’t think I’ve ever seen you in this room,” he said, a wide grin on his face. “Don’t tell me you got detention on the same day you were elected president.”

  “I’m tutoring,” I said testily. I gestured at Miles and the book he was now poring through.

  Calvin’s face fell. “Oh,” he said. “Yeah, that makes a lot more sense.” He looked disappointed that I wasn’t in trouble.

  “What about you?” I said. “What are you doing here?”

  Calvin snorted and waved his hand dismissively. “It’s not that big a deal. I may or may not have dipped my teacher’s stapler into liquid nitrogen, shattered it and then put it in his wa
ter glass like ice cubes.”

  “What do you mean, you may or may not have?” I asked.

  “It’s possible my teacher is unclear as to what actually happened to his stapler,” Calvin said, his grin widening.

  “Charming,” I said. “Now if you don’t mind…”

  He waved graciously. “Of course,” he said. “Carry on.” He slid through the classroom, sitting by Raven.

  “Hey,” he said. “I’m Calvin.”

  “Good to know,” said Raven, not looking up from her phone.

  “You’re a friend of Sarah’s, right?” Calvin prodded. “What’s your name?”

  “There are so many reasons I don’t want to tell you, I can’t count them.”

  Miles had stared at Calvin through the whole exchange. “Your cousin is…” he began.

  “My cousin,” I finished. “Unfortunately. Let’s get to work.”

  For fifteen minutes we got the cities down one by one. I had him recite them alphabetically, then by population, then by the date they were founded. Slowly it started to sink into his mind, and he grinned.

  “I think I’m getting it!” he said.

  “Not so fast,” I told him. “Let’s run them again.”

  But before we could begin, something tickled the edge of my hearing. A low whistle, barely audible in the momentary silence of the room.

  “Will whoever is whistling please stop?” I said, annoyed.

  Everyone was silent, but the whistling continued. Miles looked at me, confused.

  “What whistling, Sarah?” he asked.

  “That whistling,” I said. “Listen.”

  “I don’t hear anything,” he said, shaking his head.

  The shy girl in the front row spoke up, surprising me. “I hear it, too.” Her voice was like a mouse’s whisper.

  Calvin cupped his hands around his ears. “What are you guys talking about?”

  Behind me, I heard Blade. “No, I hear it.”

  I whirled. It certainly wasn’t Raven. I’d been sure it was Blade or Calvin, but it wasn’t — I was looking right at them. Unless…

  “Calvin,” I said, as the whistling grew louder. “Is this some gadget of yours? Some experiment? An app?”

  “What the heck are you talking about?” he said. His eyes grew wide, and I could tell he was serious. “I still don’t hear…oh, wait, there it is. Wow, it’s loud.” He covered his ears with his hands.

  He was right. It was getting very loud. I covered my own ears as I looked around for the source.

  “What the heck is that?” Miles shouted, hands pressed tight to the sides of his head.

  “You guys are weird,” I barely heard Raven mutter, still in her phone. Suddenly she clapped her hands to her head, and the phone went spilling to the floor. “Oh, jeez! What the — ”

  I heard a thump. I looked to the front of the room to see the shy girl on the ground. She was passed out cold.

  “Oh my gosh!” I cried, trying to run. But my limbs felt stiff, sluggish. My eyelids started fluttering.

  Thunk. Miles’ head hit his desk hard, and he stopped moving. I tried to shout, but I couldn’t. And the whistling grew louder.

  “Aliens, man,” Calvin said, his voice breaking into a yawn. “This is how aliens…”

  Thunk. He was out.

  I looked behind me. Blade was out. Raven’s head was nodding. I had to fight this. Someone had to warn the teachers. I had to make it to the door. I stood and tried to walk, but it was like I was mired in molasses.

  Fight it, I thought. You have to —

  I fell to the ground, and darkness took me.

  SARAH

  EVER SO SLOWLY, I REALIZED I was conscious again. My head was burning. I still heard the whistling, but it grew quieter and quieter before fading away. I felt the cool linoleum of the floor through my shirt. I pressed my palms into it, enjoying its chilly touch on my skin.

  That’s when I opened my eyes and realized I wasn’t on the classroom floor at all. I was looking up at a clear blue sky. It was the deepest blue I’d ever seen. It looked like a painting.

  Every part of my body was sore. For a brief moment, it was nice to just lie there and look up. I couldn’t see anything but sky. It felt falling into an endless sea, except for my back pressing against the cold, hard…

  What was I lying on?

  Calvin’s face popped into view above me, his eyes wide.

  “Sarah, are you okay?”

  I groaned, and pushed up off the ground to look around.

  It wasn’t just Calvin. Miles, Blade, Raven and the shy girl were all there. Miles was up, but the others were still out. Miles saw me start to rise and leapt to help me to my feet. His strong hand wrapped around my forearm, hauling me up so fast I felt my stomach lurch.

  “Sarah, are you okay?” Calvin asked again. “Can you hear me?” Miles looked at me, worried.

  I shook my head to clear it and smiled reassuringly at both of them. “I’m fine, guys. But…where the heck are we?”

  It was some sort of large square courtyard. We were surrounded by a stone wall that had to be twenty feet high. Two doors stood on opposite sides of the courtyard, both of them closed. I couldn’t see anything above the wall. We could have been in the middle of a city, the middle of a forest, or the middle of nowhere for all I knew.

  But what was way more interesting than the walls were the stone pillars. There were six of them in a circle around us. It had to be thirty feet wide. The pillars were round and had intricate designs carved all over them. They were about four feet tall and almost two feet thick.

  Each pillar had a gem on top of it. The gems were carved with hundreds of facets, but they were completely opaque. They were also big, a little smaller than my fist. I’d never seen anything like them before. In fact, I’d never seen anything like any of this before, but the design of the walls reminded me of pictures I’d seen; ancient places like Ireland, or maybe ancient Rome.

  Of course, that was impossible. Europe was halfway around the world.

  I heard a sound and looked to see the shy girl getting to her feet. She didn’t make a sound as she got up and looked around. After a moment she flipped her head down to cast her dark brown hair over one of her eyes, but she still didn’t say a word.

  I went to her and put a hand on her shoulder. “Are you okay?” I asked.

  She stared at me with a wide eye and nodded, but still didn’t say anything. I hoped she wasn’t going into shock. Mostly because I wasn’t sure what to do about it if she was.

  “I’m sorry, but I never got your name,” I said. Maybe I could make her focus on something, even if it was just talking. “I’m Sarah.”

  Finally her expression changed: a tiny little smile. “I know your name,” she said softly. “I voted for you, remember?”

  I smiled back. “That’s right. But what’s your name?”

  “Tess,” she said.

  “Okay, Tess,” I told her. “Until we figure out where we are, I need you to stick close to me or Miles, okay?”

  “Hey!” said Calvin. “Why not me?”

  “Because she’s older than you, Calvin,” I said before returning my attention to Tess. “Can you stick close to us, Tess?”

  She nodded very slowly.

  “What’s with the rocks?” asked a bored voice.

  I turned to see Raven behind Calvin and Miles, staring at the pillars. Blade was up, too, and he was looking at the pillars with interest. His eyes kept darting to one pillar with a red stone on it.

  “Check it out,” said Blade, walking over. “This pillar’s got fire carved into it.”

  “This one looks like a bolt of lightning,” said Raven.

  I looked at the pillars again. Now I saw that each had a different colored stone on top and a different symbol carved into its side. In addition to fire and lightning I saw what looked like a water drop, a current of air, and a diamond. The sixth pillar had a series of concentric circles surrounding a human head.

  My attention k
ept going to the pillar with the picture of the diamond. The gem on top was such a nice shade of grey-brown. It was compelling. I wanted to touch it, but I shook off the impulse.

  “Look at the wind,” said Calvin, his voice dreamy. Fascination filled his eyes. “It looks…fluffy. Like a bunny. Or a tribble.”

  “A what?” asked Raven, still staring at the lightning pillar.

  I saw Blade reach out toward the fire pillar. “It’s warm,” he said quietly.

  “Blade,” I said cautiously. “I don’t know if — ”

  A blinding flash of light burst beneath his hand as it brushed against the stone. I had to blink a few times as a white streak was seared into my vision. Blade backed cautiously away from the pillar and the gem on top of it.

  “Um…oops?” he said.

  A low hum grew upon the air. The gems on top of the pillars began to glow. The glow spread down the pillars, shining through the carvings like the light was coming from inside the rock.

  “What did you do?” I asked Blade, trying to hide my anxiety.

  “Nothing!” Blade insisted. The hum got louder. “I just touched it, I swear!”

  Without saying a word, we all backed into the middle of the circle. I put an arm protectively across Tess. She clung to my shirt sleeve with a trembling hand.

  The gems rose up off the tops of the pillars and started to spin in midair. They glowed brighter, as did the pillars. I saw Miles’ face bathed in the light, throwing harsh shadows across his anxious expression.

  “Dude, you activated them,” said Calvin. “That’s not good.”

  “Oh, like you’re some kind of electronic stone expert,” said Blade.

  “Well, look at them, man!” said Miles.

  “I don’t think they’re electronic,” said Calvin. “I think they’re — ”

  He shut up as the stones began to orbit, moving in a circle around us, hovering right at my eye line about a foot over the tops of the pillars. They moved faster and faster until they were a glowing blur in the air.

  We needed to get out of there. The stones were high enough to duck under. Maybe we could get out before whatever was about to happen, happened. I didn’t know if the rocks were bombs or some kind of electric fence or what, but they were about to do something. When they did, I had a feeling we didn’t want to be right in the middle.